Stand alone book

[Anselm Paulinus]

Could this book serve as an all alone book for somebody working on an EJB project. Does it have all one needs like the Enterprise Java Book by Monson-Haefel Oreily publication or is one going to have to fall back to other books for support? Again how much practical knowledge of EJB coding does one need to use this book effectively. How much accommodation does it have for beginners?

[Bert Bates]

Anselm -
Well I'd say that if I was creating an EJB application I would have a few books on hand
We hope HF EJB will be a great intro, we like Monson-Haefel, and we like Bitter EJB too. As specs go we think the EJB spec is pretty darn good.

[Kathy Sierra]

I think it all depends on your current level of knowledge. If you already know and understand a decent amount of EJB, and can *purchase* only one book (given that the spec and tutorial from Sun are free, so I won't count those -- you should get them!) then I would choose Richard's book (the O'Reilly EJB book) rather than ours, unless your goal is to pass the exam, fairly soon, in which case Richard's book will make it more difficult to do that in a short period of time.
However, if you do NOT know EJB well at all, then I would say start with our book if you want to come up to speed in the quickest way possible. You can CERTAINLY do that with Richard's book, but ours will get you to a solid foundation more quickly, while his can take your further, but it will take you more time to really *get* the foundation knowledge at a deep level. We spend pages and pages on things he covers in one sentence, while he covers more topics than we do.
Hope that helps
cheers,
Kathy

[John Hembree]

Sounds like that's the book for me, I'm completely new to this side of Java.